In 2000, when Donald Trump was openly discussing the possibility of a White House campaign, he made a curious boast: "It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it."

Sixteen years later, it's not at all clear he was kidding.

In June, Rachel noted on the show that Trump was spending a striking amount of his campaign resources on Trump corporate products and services. As it turns out, this only intensified as the campaign progressed: NBC News reports this morning that Trump's political enterprise ended up spending $3 million on Trump's other enterprises in the election cycle's closing weeks.

The billionaire real-estate mogul donated $10 million to his campaign in the lead up to the election.... Much of that went back into his and his family's pockets, however, as Trump frequently used his own businesses and properties to host campaign events, provide lodging, transportation and even meals at various points throughout the campaign.

During the home stretch and the three weeks after Nov. 8, the campaign committee spent $2 million on his airline TAG Air to pay for the 737 he used to campaign across the country, and nearly $54,000 at various Trump restaurants. Other payments included more than $236,000 to his hotel in Las Vegas, where he stayed for two nights during the third presidential debate at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

When Seattle raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, the right predicted an economic disaster for the city. The predictions were entirely in line with what Republican policymakers say anytime the subject comes up anywhere: raising the cost of labor will lead employers to hire fewer workers, which has the effect of pushing unemployment higher.

Bloomberg View's Barry Ritholtz published a piece this week taking a look at how those predictions are holding up in Seattle's case study.

As one of my colleagues wrote last week, the “unemployment rate in the city of Seattle – the tip of the spear when it comes to minimum wage experiments – has now hit a new cycle low of 3.4%.” Meanwhile, a University of Washington study on the minimum wage law found little or no evidence of job losses or business closings.

Although you can never declare a game over until the final whistle, this experiment is starting to look like a rout.

In June 2014, local officials approved the $15 minimum wage, to be phased in over several years, and at the time, the city's unemployment rate was 5.4%. The law first took effect in April 2015, when Seattle's unemployment rate was 4.3%. As of last month, after the wage hike, the city's unemployment rate was down to 3.4%.

There are a couple of relevant caveats to keep in mind. For one thing, Seattle's minimum wage has gone up each of the last two years, but it's not yet at $15 an hour. Depending on the size of the business, it's currently between $10.50 and $13 -- well above the federal floor, but not yet at its destination. For another, local economies can vary quite a bit for all sorts of reasons, and Seattle's successes may or may not be easily duplicated elsewhere.

But in this experiment, the right's predictions were plainly wrong. The question then becomes what conservatives will learn from this case study.read more

One of the more surprising aspects of Donald Trump's transition period is his habit of skipping intelligence briefings. Immediately after the election, President Obama ordered national security officials to give Trump and Mike Pence access to the same information he receives daily, so that they're up to speed and fully prepared when they take office in January.

But as NBC News and the Washington Post reported, a team of intelligence analysts "has been prepared to deliver daily briefings on global developments and security threats to Trump," but the Republican president-elect has generally blown them off. As of earlier this week, Trump had reportedly only received four of these briefings -- for an average of one per week -- since Election Day.

President-elect Donald Trump is receiving an average of one presidential intelligence briefing a week, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter, far fewer than most of his recent predecessors.

Although they are not required to, presidents-elect have in the past generally welcomed the opportunity to receive the President's Daily Brief (PDB), the most highly classified and closely held document in the government, on a regular basis.

It was not immediately clear why Trump has decided not to receive the intelligence briefings available to President Barack Obama more frequently, or whether that has made any difference in his presidential preparations.

This hasn't gone unnoticed. In a USA Todayop-ed yesterday, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the ranking members on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees, respectively, noted they find it "particularly troubling" that the president-elect "has mostly declined to take the daily intelligence briefing" -- breaking with what other presidents-elect have done for decades.

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta added this week that "one of the concerns I have right now is that this president is not getting his intelligence briefings."read more

With Election Day having come and gone, the political world's obsessive interest in polling has largely dissipated, and for good reason: we no longer need to comb through data in the hopes of figuring out who's going to win.

But that doesn't mean survey results are suddenly unimportant. It matters, for example, that Donald Trump's presidential honeymoon is over before it starts, with a new report from the Pew Research Center showing the Republican headed into Inauguration Day with strikingly weak public support. Similarly, new results from Public Policy Polling, which Rachel noted on the show last night in an exclusive sneak-peak, found a majority of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the president-elect.

For all the Republican talk about Trump having a "mandate" as a result of his "landslide" victory, the fact remains that Trump, who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, is not held in high regard. The Pew data found most of the country still considers him ill-qualified, reckless, hard to like, and lacking in sound judgment.

To think Trump will take the White House with the American mainstream on his side, with the electorate rallying behind his vision and agenda, is plainly ridiculous.

But what struck me as especially notable about the new survey results is the persistence of the so-called "reality gap."

* Unemployment: Under President Obama, job growth has been quite strong, and the unemployment rate has improved dramatically. PPP, however, found that 67% of Trump voters believe the unemployment rate went up under Obama -- which is the exact opposite of reality.

* Stock Market: Since the president was elected, the stock market has soared, nearly tripling since the height of the Great Recession. PPP found that 39% of Trump voters believe the market has gone down under Obama -- which is also the exact opposite of reality.read more

Ilhan Omar, Minnesota state representative-elect and the first Somali-American female legislator, talks with Rachel Maddow about her harrowing experience of anti-Muslim harassment while on a trip to the White House. watch

Rachel Maddow reports on a past domestic physical abuse accusation against Donald Trump's labor secretary choice, Andy Puzder, and the recent recanting of those accusations by a spokesman for Puzder's former wife. watch

Jo Becker, investigative reporter for The New York Times, talks with Rachel Maddow about the mistake impression by the media and Americans generally that Donald Trump will somehow separate from his business for the sake of the presidency. watch

* The madness is out of control: "A Florida woman who said the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people -- including 20 children -- was a hoax has been indicted for making death threats to one of the shooting victim's parents, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday."

* Dylann Roof's trial began today in South Carolina: "Faced with perhaps his only chance to persuade the jury to spare Mr. Roof's life, the lawyer, David I. Bruck, used his opening statement to concede Mr. Roof's guilt and suggest doubts about his stability."

* A stunning statistic: "Opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released Thursday. That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent from 2014 to 2015."

* President Obama said this week that during his tenure, "no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland." The right may not like it, but that's true.

* Keep expectations low: "In an interview with Time magazine ... [Donald Trump] didn't go into specifics but signaled that he could find a way to accommodate the Dreamers." He specifically said, "We're going to work something out that's going to make people happy and proud," though no one knows what that means.

* National Center for Health Statistics: "For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year -- a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States.... In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death."

* I've received a few emails about this: "Some on the left are still circulating theories about how to prevent their emerging Supreme Court nightmare by somehow shoehorning Garland into the nation's top court."read more

Last week, The American Prospect had a report on the "Fight for 15" campaign, committed to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and the challenges facing the national initiative. Looking ahead to Donald Trump's Labor Secretary nominee, the article added, "Perhaps the worst-case scenario for low-wage workers would be Andy Puzder."

President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to name Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that operates the fast food outlets Hardee's and Carl's Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor, people close to the transition said on Thursday.

Mr. Puzder has spent his career in the private sector and has opposed efforts to expand eligibility for overtime pay, while arguing that large minimum wage increases hurt small businesses and lead to job loss among low-skilled workers.

Note, while several news organizations have said Puzder is Trump's choice for the Labor Department, this has not yet been confirmed by NBC News. [Update: It's now official; Puzder will be nominated.]

That said, if the reports are accurate, and Senate Republicans confirm the selection, Puzder would join a long and growing list of Trump's team members who have no background in elected office and no governing experience whatsoever. The list already included Steven Mnuchin (Treasury), Ben Carson (HUD), Betsy DeVos (Education), Wilbur Ross (Commerce), and Stephen Bannon (White House strategist).

As it turns out, Puzder is also the latest in a series of multimillionaires and Republican donors to receive a cabinet slot from Trump.

But the most glaring problem with this selection is that Trump's preferred Labor Secretary is deeply hostile towards practically every proposal that would benefit working people. From the aforementioned American Prospectpiece:

In March 2005, then-President George W. Bush, feeling emboldened after winning re-election, made a provocative move: he nominated John Bolton to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. This enraged congressional Democrats -- along with many diplomats from allied countries -- not just because of Bolton's far-right ideology, but because of his overt hostility towards the institution where he'd soon work.

Bolton, after all, was on record saying that "if the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference" and that "there's no such thing as the United Nations." For Bolton's critics, the principle seemed fairly obvious: if someone opposes the core mission of an institution, and is skeptical about the institution's existence, they probably shouldn't work there.

More than a decade later, we're seeing the same dynamic play out on a much broader scale. For example, Donald Trump announced his choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday, and the president-elect chose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R), who is effectively a caricature of a ridiculous EPA nominee.

"If you were not really sure about what he thinks about the EPA, which the Trump administration is going to put him in charge of, this is a line out of his official state bio. [Pruitt] brags, 'Scott Pruitt is a leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda.'

"A leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda. He will now be in charge of the EPA's activist agenda. You kind of have to admire the gumption on this one."

So the good news is, Trump's nominee is neither a billionaire nor an amateur with no background in public service. The bad news is, Pruitt fundamentally rejects the work of the department he'll soon lead.

And while that's as disheartening as it is bizarre, this keeps happening.read more

Today's installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* Rep. Keith Ellison's (D-Minn.) bid to become the next DNC chairman received a big boost this morning with an endorsement from the AFL-CIO.

* And speaking of the national party committees, the RNC has chosen the venue for its holiday party this year. That wouldn't ordinarily be notable, except Republican officials have decided to rent space in the newly renovated Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

* On the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, Newt Gingrich thought it'd be a good idea to praise the Japanese for having "displayed professional brilliance and technological power launching surprises from Hawaii to the Philippines."

* Following up on a heated dispute during a post-election forum last week, Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post today. Among other things, Palmieri argued, "I don't know whether the Trump campaign needed to give a platform to white supremacists to win. But the campaign clearly did, and it had the effect of empowering the white-nationalist movement."

* It looks like the recount in Michigan is ending: "After two days of ballot counting, conflicting court decisions and legal wranglings between frustrated lawyers, a federal judge on Wednesday halted the hand recount of 4.8 million ballots cast for president in Michigan, concluding there's no real evidence of foul play and there's no valid reason to continue the recount."

* Glenn R. Davis Jr., a Republican delegate in Virginia, kicked off his campaign for lieutenant governor the other day, saying in a written statement, "Donald Trump isn't a lawyer and he isn't an insurance salesman. He's a job creator, and so am I." Trump lost Virginia this year by four percentage points.read more

A few months ago, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence looked into allegations that Vladimir Putin's Russia took deliberate criminal steps to interfere with the American presidential election. The agencies came to the same conclusion: Russia apparently stole American materials in order to interfere with our political process, hoping to boost one American candidate over the other.

An alleged crime of this magnitude should probably be of great interest to Congress, but of late, the Republican majority, satisfied that suspected Russian efforts helped the GOP, has ignored Democratic calls for an investigation. As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, the partisan attitudes are starting to change, at least a little.

Democrats' efforts got a bipartisan boost Wednesday, when Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said he would lead an inquiry into the Russian operation. Mr. Graham, who previously had called on Congress to look into the Russian hacks, told CNN that he would pursue inquiries via subcommittees that he chairs. [...]

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) said his committee has looked into holding closed-door hearings on the issue of potential Russian interference in the election. "We have committee members that are interested and we certainly intend to pursue what if any interference took place," Mr. Corker said.

Mother Jones' David Corn reported yesterday that Democrats are pushing for an independent commission -- along the lines of the 9/11 Commission -- to investigate the allegations, but no Republicans have endorsed the idea. What's more, the creation of such a panel would need a presidential signature -- and Donald Trump continues to believe that Putin is telling the truth and U.S. intelligence agencies are lying about Russian activities.

I'm sure this is going to come across as horribly naive, but there's no reason this controversy should be seen as necessarily partisan or ideological.read more

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Launched in 2008, “The Rachel Maddow Show” follows the machinations of policy making in America, from local political activism to international diplomacy. Rachel Maddow looks past the distractions of political theater and stunts and focuses on the legislative proposals and policies that shape American life - as well as the people making and influencing those policies and their ultimate outcome, intended or otherwise.